Adobe Photoshop CS3

Additions to tools, adjustments and filters

It goes without saying that a pretty face alone isn't enough to make an upgrade—they call that version the Scarlett Johansson edition—so let's look at the new features that Adobe has thrown in to convince us that they can play the professional part. All the things mentioned here are in the Standard edition as well as Extended; the features exclusive to Extended are covered clearly later.

Quick Selection tool

As a tool borrowed from Photoshop Elements, the Quick Selection tool is designed to make area and object selection easier. It's sort of like the Magnetic Lasso tool combined with the Magic Wand tool with a small brain thrown in for good measure:

Click for animation.

As you can sort of tell from the screen movie, it can be a little awkward getting great results in low-contrast situations and it's basically useless for hair, so it's no replacement for the Extract tool. That said, it does an good quick job for selecting solid outlines with clean edges:

The alternative for the selection above—making an initial area selection and then using the color range selection for the sweater—is much slower and produces basically the same results. The Quick Selection tool is just that—quick—and while it is limited, Adobe in clearly encouraging this to be used in conjunction with another new feature.

Refine Edge

Selections and masks often go through a lot of filtering themselves to accommodate for things like image focus and edge transitions so Photoshop CS3 hopes to shorten this process (while making it less esoteric) by putting the controls more upfront and center in the Options toolbar of the selection tools.

When a selection is made, you hit Refine Edge, and a dialog pops up that lets you interactively do a combination of selection modifications, while being able to preview them in a variety of mask modes.

Refine Edge in action. Click for animation.

The Refine Edge will save time since there's no need to do all these operations separately or to enter Quick Mask mode to visually blur the mask to match the image focus. In combination with the Quick Selection tool, it makes for quick and decent quality selections and masks. It's not mind-bending stuff, but it's very handy once you get used to it.

New curves dialog

As I pointed out in my Editing your digital images without the mystery tutorials, the curves dialog is the shortest route to powerful color tweaking and it's the bread and butter of professional color adjustment. Adobe knows it and has given it a significant upgrade: it now has a histogram overlay.

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This basically means you'll never have to see the Levels palette again just to visually clip in on white and black points; the fewer adjustments you have in your Layers palette, the better. This came at a cost though: to make room for the 256-line histogram, the Curves palette has gotten bigger, and on laptop screens the lost real estate is very noticeable. You'll also notice the Preset popup in the pic above—this is something that has been added to a lot of the common adjustment dialogs and the curves palette comes prestocked with some common tweaks that will help imaging newbies understand what things like an S-curve for contrast looks like:

To professional retouchers and photographers, the histogram in the new Curves dialog is going to become instantly valuable, but I can't help feel like it's been a long time coming. Still, for my work, it's a huge plus.

Black and white conversion

Converting images from color to grayscale typically gives you a very flat image that can't be fixed just by adding contrast so Photoshop CS3 has added a more controlled adjustment (and optional Adjustment Layer) for black and white conversion. Working much like a color filter on a camera lens, the Black and White adjustment gets better contrast and tone by letting you specify colors to suppress and increase. If you don't know exactly what colors need filtering, the conversion process can be made much simpler by just clicking and dragging within the image to adjust the relevant tones. Or you can just start with one of the presets to get a quality you like:

The true power of the Black and White adjustment: from Al Jolson to Robert Smith in under five seconds.

Adobe is doing a lot of this click and drag for tweaks in Lightroom and I'm hoping it catches on more since it takes out a lot of the guesswork for color work like this.

The Black and White adjustment is really great but I do have one small nag: it can't be done in CMYK mode. I'm sure there is a good reason for this technically but this will cost many people time in CMYK to RGB conversion, which isn't particularly fast for larger images. But as you can see, the results are really nice.